The present invention relates to a transmitter apparatus and a receiver apparatus, being suitable for protecting the copyright of contents transmitted, such as, audio/video information, for example, in particular, when transmitting the contents through a network.
Accompanying developments made on a personal computer (hereinafter, being called by “PC”), in particular, on the processing capacity; such as, the calculation speed and/or the memory capacity thereof, a tendency is also advancing into bringing a hard disk drive (hereinafter, being called by “HDD”), which is built-in within the PC, to be large in the capacity thereof. Under such the situation as was mentioned above, in recent years, it comes to be possible to make it in such away of using; i.e., viewing the picture of TV broadcasting program recoded on a display of the PC, while recording it with using the HDD, on the PC of such a rank that is widely used at home. On the other hand, with the tendency of a low price of the HDD having a large capacity, a HDD recording apparatus appears on the market, building the HDD therein and digitally recoding video/audio information therein, to be a household recording apparatus, for example, and it attracts an attention for a good usability thereof, due to the fact that a disk is used as a medium for recoding the picture thereon.
On the other hand, for the purpose of achieving the copyright protection on the information, such as the contents, etc., there is already known a method of copy protection, which is already applied in digital AV equipments, such as, Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) method (described in “5C Digital Transmission Content Protection White Paper, by Hitachi, Ltd., Non-Patent Publication 1), as an example thereof, determining a copy protection method on the IEEE1394 bus, for example.
Also, there are already disclosed a several number of technologies, for achieving the copy protection for the purpose of copyright protection between the apparatuses or between networks; such as, Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2000-287192 (2000)) and Patent Document 2 (Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2001-358706 (2001)), for example.